


Everything Stays

by thenonsenseprophet (ProfessionalCouchPotato)



Series: Ahsoka Displaced [8]
Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Sequel Trilogy, Star Wars: The Clone Wars (2008) - All Media Types
Genre: Death of Multiple Clone Infants, Death of Unnamed Character, Gen, Honest, I do like the characters, Psychological Horror, Rewriting the sequels, graphic depictions of injuries, only a little
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-24
Updated: 2021-02-24
Packaged: 2021-03-15 12:09:15
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,125
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29683767
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ProfessionalCouchPotato/pseuds/thenonsenseprophet
Summary: Ever so slightly,Daily and nightly,In little ways,Everything stays
Relationships: Rey & Ben Solo
Series: Ahsoka Displaced [8]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2164395
Kudos: 4





	Everything Stays

**Author's Note:**

> Day 8: Yee Yee (haw haw) Summary is the lyrics from "Everything stays", from Adventure Time
> 
> By far my longest and most brutal chapter in terms of trigger warnings, please read the tags. Skip this chapter if you liked the sequels, too, because I didn't.

Contrary to popular belief, Lotho Minor is not composed  _ entirely  _ of trash.

Just mostly.

There are some spots where watchtowers sit on stilts above the pervasive refuge, air filtration systems chugging away steadily and adding noise pollution. The people who live there are usually some variation of Mining Guild descendants, whose ancestors were put there to atone for bad behavior, or penitentiary officers, for much the same reason. But the real punishment is for those who live in scabbed-together shanty towns among the trash.

This time, Ahsoka is fairly certain that the door has opened into a time beyond her own lifespan, because while she recognizes some of the refuse in this hellish place, the insignias on the arms of the prison droids are unfamiliar. 

She has wrapped a quick shroud of  _ notice-me-not _ around herself in the Force, and so far the only one whose eyes have not slid right over her is a thin, brown haired woman. She has what looks like an old sheet for clothing, and it is secured with a series of strategically placed ropes and ties. Her hair is pulled into three messy buns on the back of her head.

“Hello,” Ahsoka says quietly, crouching beside the woman as she digs for something in the trash. 

An uncertain look is flashed her way. “Hello,” the woman replies.

“What’s your name?” asks Ahsoka. The Force is strong, albeit undisciplined, in the woman, who clumsily tests Ahsoka’s shields and then withdraws.

“Rey,” comes the slightly hesitant answer.

“Rey who?”

“Rey, Queen of Garbage,” she says wryly. “I have no family name.” 

“And what are you doing here, Rey?” Ahsoka gestures to the woman’s ankle, where a prisoner’s cuff is conspicuously absent. 

“I was born here. This is my home,” Rey says, but there is an edge of untruth, _bitterness,_ to the words. 

Ahsoka hums thoughtfully. “Perhaps you would like to leave this place?”

The woman’s eyes flash, and Ahsoka quickly revises her initial assessment of the girl's age; with that defiant glint in her eyes, Rey looks younger than the grime on her face suggests.

“Of course I want to leave,” Rey says hotly. “Someday, I’m going to find a Jedi, and they’re going to take me away from this place.”

“Oh really,” Ahsoka’s eyebrows raise, “And you think you’re just going to find a Jedi laying around in all this muck?”

“I’ve found stranger things,” she retorts, jerking her head towards a stained woven sack at her elbow. Its contents, whatever they are, do lend it some unusual deformities. 

Ahsoka takes a moment to step back, fortifying her disguise in the Force until even Rey’s gaze slips back to her work. She closes her eyes and peers into the currents of life on this planet. 

Despite its state of decay, or perhaps because of it, the Force flows through Lotho Minor to an unusual degree. It whispers of potential, for both the light and the dark; it is a potential that is reflected in young Rey as well. She may very well find a Jedi under the sedimentation of waste.

She may also find something darker. Such is the way of the Force, it seems.

Possibilities originate and terminate in the young woman before Ahsoka. She appears completely oblivious to them and the limits of her own abilities, completely focused on using an old speeder throttle to chip at something in the pile of trash. But Ahsoka thinks that just maybe, the Light is stronger in her than the Dark. Would just a nudge be enough to set her along the destiny she must crave?

Ahsoka reaches out again, probing the planet for those pockets of Light and Dark she had felt before. One in particular snags her attention, hints of adventure, friendship, heartbreak, and growth flashing through her mind. That seems a worthy quest for Rey, and maybe the galaxy as a whole.

Very gently, she directs the song of a Kyber crystal, cracked but singing valiantly, to the surface level of Rey’s thoughts. 

The young woman’s head turns ponderously, her eyes shining with curiosity and the need to be _someone_ \- 

Ahsoka's vision blacks out.

Her knees hit the ground on Lotho Minor, but when she throws out her hands to stop her fall, they connect with a slick metallic surface and force a punched-out noise from her throat. She shakes her head to clear the spots in her vision, and beneath her somewhere, there comes the tortured groan of crumpling metal. 

Ahsoka’s head whips up as another screech rips the air much more nearby. She barely turns her back in time to avoid the hail of transparisteel that follows, blown in by a merciless gale. 

Shards of transparisteel and frigid drops of water batter the back of her neck, and she can barely feel her head spinning over the sound of the wind. Everything around her is gray and chrome, and the only light that filters in through the shattered window is the washed-out light of a storm. Even that is blotted out as Ahsoka staggers to her feet, sucking in a reflexive gasp of horror.

Then the wave hits, and whatever structure this is shudders. Ahsoka is tossed into a far wall as the floor bucks wildly and seafoam from the crest cuts livid marks on her skin. The ocean beyond the window boils with ice-cold fury.

When Ahsoka has a moment, she will stop to wonder about this turn of events. But another wave is looming in the distance, and now is not the time.

She staggers to her feet and breaks into a run, following a hallway that looks much the same as the one she had just left, until she reaches a split and veers into the hall she desperately hopes will lead her deeper into the complex and further away from the exposed windows. Without the light from outside, Ahsoka runs into halls that get progressively deeper and darker. 

She skids down a ramp and vaults the railing of a nearby staircase, blindly hoping that wherever she’s going is safer. Somehow, she manages to be in the air at the exact moment another shockwave hits. 

Then, a scream echoes from somewhere in the labyrinth of halls. 

If Ahsoka had any hair on her body at all, every bit of it would have stood on end; the sound curdles her blood and she wavers for a split second before taking off at a dead run. The scream echoes weirdly, refusing to die even as the whole structure twists and groans, and as Ahsoka runs, she passes room after abandoned room that carry the noises directly into the miasma of dread in the Force.

Lights begin to flicker on as she passes. They struggle to illuminate deadened medical equipment and empty spaces for leisure, and every one seems to reach out phantom hands, calling for help, for company, _please it's been so long and we're lonely--_

Ahsoka wishes the lights had just stayed off.

Finally, she arrives at a durasteel blast door, and nearly trips over the body. Ahsoka stifles a shout, the sight of a body’s thousand yard stare nearly too much on top of everything else. The man is old, but the shock on his face and the lightsaber burn through his heart are new. 

That same burn is present in the blast door, where someone had determinedly cut their way through. They must have been in a hurry, because the last edge of the hole shows evidence of being ripped away with the Force, not melted. Ahsoka steps over the body and through the hole, and then stops short.

A pair of sentients are dancing through a huge room, jumping apart and then together again with a clash of their blades, weaving between huge durasteel and glass pillars with such speed as to be nearly invisible to the naked eye. All Ahsoka sees of them are their lightsabers, clear blue and crackling red. But that isn’t what makes her stagger back.

Glass pods protrude from the durasteel pillars, each one containing one of a million identical fetuses. 

_ All dead. _

It is horror like Ahsoka has never known before. She feels her shoulder blades hit the wall, and her hand flies up to cover her mouth and stop the nausea churning in her stomach. The lights in some of the pods remain on, but it makes no difference at all, because every one of the tiny forms in them are dead. 

The two combatants continue their swirl of blades, uncaring of the grisly scene they inhabit. Then the battle stalls as the wielder of the blue lightsaber is pushed back by their opponent, landing against a pillar with a crash of broken glass. Something in Ahsoka screams in protest, despite knowing that it is of no use. Only when the wielder of the red lightsaber looks up does she realize that she had actually screamed out loud.

Thus discovered, she pulls her own lightsabers from their hooks and settles into the opening stance of jar’kai. Ahsoka’s mind mercifully allows her thoughts to fall away; the numbness of battle readiness is a welcome oblivion. 

_ “You,”  _ hisses the darksider, and a sense of deja vu rudely intrudes. 

“Rey?” Ahsoka manages. Rey, for it is unmistakably the same woman from Lotho Minor, snarls like a cornered animal and lunges at her. Ahsoka crosses her blades in an upward block, and discovers her mistake when a second beam of red ignites at the other end of Rey’s lightsaber hilt. The second blade comes in fast from below, and Ahsoka only barely manages to leap over it. 

“What-” she starts, but is forced to focus on the fight when Rey sends a flurry of glass flying at her. Ahsoka learned her lesson with slugthrowers long ago, and so instead of trying to deflect the projectiles, she shoves outward with the Force. Her hands remain white-knuckled on her lightsabers, but Rey’s arcs up into the air as she stumbles gracelessly. Strong Rey may be, but barely more disciplined than the person Ahsoka had met amidst the trash. 

Quickly, Ahsoka calls Rey’s lightsaber to her - and then deftly slices it in half long ways. Rey lets out a howl of agony, and it is different than the one Ahsoka had heard before, but no less tragic.

“How could you,” Rey sobs. Then her hand shoots out and the blue lightsaber of her previous opponent lands in her palm. The blue cast of the blade on Rey’s pallid face looks like it should be right, but just isn’t.

“This is all your fault,” the young woman shouts, and comes at Ahsoka again. 

“How?” Ahsoka asks desperately, and jumps away from Rey’s wild swings, “How is this my fault?” 

_ “I don’t know!”  _

The cloning facility shakes again, and the wind somehow howls over a structure that was designed to prevent the noise. Rey will bring this whole place into the waves, and herself along with it.

“Listen to me,” Ahsoka says urgently. “You can’t do this. Whatever it is that has you hurting now, it can’t be worth killing over.”

Rey snarls. “Oh yeah? Watch me.”

Her swings with the lightsaber are sloppy, and Ahsoka’s mind immediately supplies her with every hole in her meager defense. But she is not here to kill Rey. If anything, she would prefer to save her.

“When I met you, you told me that you wanted a Jedi to save you,” Ahsoka tries, reaching for the Light she knows must still be present in the girl. “When did you decide to start killing them?”

“When…” Rey’s lightsaber dips, then flies back up into an aggressive guard. “When I learned what they’re really like.”

“And what’s that?”

“Sneaky,” Rey says, and then a piece of shrapnel hits her over the head, and she collapses to the ground. The lightsaber rolls out of her hand and across the floor to its owner.

“Thank you for distracting her,” says the man, struggling to his feet. He looks tired, likely not helped by the large gash on his back where the glass of the pods has embedded itself. 

He makes a wounded noise and slumps against the pillar. Ahsoka steps to his side and carefully slings his arm over her shoulder, taking most of his weight. She lifts Rey’s limp form and carries her behind them with the Force. 

They make an odd procession, limping and floating along the vacant halls of Kamino.

Finally, Ahsoka steers the man onto the medical table in one of the rooms she had passed earlier, and wordlessly motions for him to lay on his stomach. He winces while complying, and Ahsoka adds bruised ribs to his list of potential injuries. He looks close to passing out as she cuts the fabric away from his bloodied skin.

“This is going to hurt,” she warns, and doesn’t wait for him to reply before yanking one of the smaller pieces of glass out. 

A nearby machine whirs to life and then explodes in a shower of sparks, and the man finally loses consciousness. 

Ahsoka works for a while, not willing to rush and risk the injury healing wrong. She has more than enough experience to know why it is important to clean and bandage every cut, no matter how insignificant it may seem. The storm begins to abate after the first hour, but picks up again when Rey shows signs of stirring. Ahsoka pushes a command to sleep into Rey’s mind, and the wind calms down again.

The bacta she finds in the medical cabinets is out of date, but it’s better than nothing. She slathers the man’s wounds with the stuff, then applies copious amounts of bandages, just because they’re there. 

Then, there is nothing left for her hands to do, and Ahsoka’s thoughts wander back to that horrible chamber. 

Every one of those deaths was pointless, wasteful, and knowing the Kaminoans, cruel. The injustice of it makes her want to curl up and cry. So many brothers, so many bright lights, extinguished for no other reason than that the Clone Wars had ended, and there was no more need for a supply of warm bodies to throw at a meaningless enemy. 

Ahsoka’s senses stretch out to the cloning chamber, and then beyond. The whole facility is vacuous, but traces of its former inhabitants still linger; there is a distant disembodied chatter in a cafeteria, the beginnings of camaraderie amid the retorts of blasters in darkened training rooms, and in the most secluded cloning chamber--

An echo of terror, and a single, dim light.

Ahsoka is on her feet in an instant, reinforcing her command over Rey thoughtlessly and practically sprinting down the halls towards that beacon. How there could be anyone alive in this place she does not know, but she knows there is, and she needs to find them.

She stops outside the door to the chamber. When it does not open automatically, she smashes the keypad set into the wall next to it and begins slicing. It would be quicker to cut her way in, but she doesn’t wish to run headlong into trouble,  _ again. _

The doors finally slide open with a hiss of displaced air and the smell is _terrible_. It hits Ahsoka like a dead fish in the face, and she makes a disgusted noise before taking a gulp of clean air and stepping inside.

There is another body on the floor, although it isn’t nearly as recent as the last one she had encountered. Carbon scoring lines the walls of the room, with one single break in an otherwise even pattern, about the height of a Kaminoan’s head.

There is a bundle of wires, some of which are haphazardly spliced together, and it creates a trail that leads to the corner of the room. 

When Ahsoka cautiously makes her way over, her eyes are immediately drawn to a small glass pod, shoved into the bottom drawer of a crooked set of cabinets and half-hidden under a pile of flimsi. It emits the faintest of lights, but it is the first she has seen since arriving on Kamino that is not some shade of blue or white.

The pod glows a soft purple, illuminating the iced-over silhouette of an infant, cryogenically frozen. 

Ahsoka glances back at the body, fallen perhaps while guarding this pod or the wires that had allowed it to sustain life. She makes her way back over, and begins inspecting the tangle.

\----

The man is awake when Ahsoka makes her way back to the medical room. He is staring, almost unblinkingly, at Rey’s peaceful expression. 

“Thank you, again, for your help,” he croaks. “I don’t know if I would’ve made it if you hadn’t-” He finally looks up, catching sight of the pod thawing in Ahsoka’s arms. “What is that?”

“A youngling,” she replies. The infant inside sleeps calmly, but the man’s face contorts in a series of complicated expressions. 

“Do you know what that is?” He asks.

“A clone, probably.”

He makes an annoyed noise in the back of his throat. “I  _ meant,  _ do you know who that is a clone  _ of.”  _

“No,” Ahsoka says shortly. “And I don’t want to know. It shouldn’t matter. It is completely helpless.”

“Whatever,” he snorts. “It’s not my problem.” 

Ahsoka considers this for a moment. “I think it is, actually,” she says, thoughtfully stroking the tip of her lek. At the man’s incredulous look, she clarifies, “I am not meant to influence this child’s fate, you are.”

“That’s not- I have other things I need to do!” 

She stares at him flatly.

“Aren’t you a Jedi?” she asks with a pointed glance at the lightsaber resting near his hand. He scowls, but nods. “Then open yourself to the Force, and you will feel the same certainty I do.”

“You sound like my uncle,” the man mutters, but sullenly complies. A furrow appears between his eyebrows. When next he regards the pod, it is with resignation. 

“I came here for her,” he sighs, gesturing to Rey. “I didn’t realize I’d be starting a family.”

Ahsoka cracks a smile at that, and turns to leave. 

“Wait,” the man calls after her, “Aren’t  _ you  _ a Jedi? My uncle would probably love to meet you.”

“That can’t happen,” she says, and thinks  _ getting involved didn’t work out so well this time.  _ She turns her head to look at Rey. Her neatly bisected lightsaber rests in pieces by her side, and Ahsoka can just see the glint of red Kyber, many times cracked, within the hilt. 

“Make sure she doesn’t wake up,” Ahsoka instructs the man, and walks back into the heart of the facility. There is one door in particular that she needs to find.

**Author's Note:**

> I'm pretty much done posting (editing) this story, and it's kinda made me realize a couple of things, especially as I'm active on AO3 and reading other fanworks. I love to read slow burn, feel good type stories, but what I really love to write are these bitter, jaded, emotionally nasty stories (usually with some sort of ambiguous ending). 
> 
> I have always that the strongest characters are those that have truly stared into the abyss and come away all the stronger for it; that's why characters like Obi-Wan and Ahsoka are among my all time favorites. And I love that in fiction of any type, you can push a character to their very limits, or past them, and crack them open just a little bit to see what makes them strong enough to handle anything life throws at them. Often, it's the best way to look inside ourselves, as well. I love these characters, and writing and reading about them, because it makes me hopeful that I can learn from them and learn about my own areas of growth.
> 
> I guess what I'm trying to say is that I feel bad about killing off those baby clones and then having people dance on top of them :) it was necessary because I wanted to feed off Ahsoka's suffering


End file.
